OPERATION SPARROW: The Spy’s Trapdoor to Juno Beach
A talk by Professor Jason Bell
Date: Thursday, October 1, 2026
Time: 2:00-4:00 pm
Location: Observatory Building, 315 Bloor Street West, Toronto
About the Event
Join us as Jason Bell, best-selling author (Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada's Greatest Spy, 2023), launches his new book: Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War(Harper Collins, September 2026).
Professor Jason Bell draws on declassified records from archives in the United States, England, Germany, Hungary and Canada, to reconstruct a little-known joint British-American-Canadian spy operation that changed the course of the Second World War.
In March 1944 a Royal Air Force bomber lifted off from a storm-battered airfield in southern Italy carrying three American officers, two young Austrian resistance fighters in German uniforms, and a Canadian jump sergeant. The Americans, code-named Sparrow, were under orders to parachute into Nazi-allied Hungary and be captured — the only mission of the war designed for a German interrogation cell. They found themselves facing brutal interrogation while selling the lie that D-Day would strike the Balkans, two thousand kilometres southeast of Normandy. Canadian commandos followed, pinning down German forces. Drawing on declassified records from archives in the United States, England, Germany, Hungary and Canada, Jason Bell reconstructs a little-known joint British-American-Canadian spy operation that changed the course of the war.
Dr. Paul Ramsey, a Junior Fellow of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, will serve as Discussant.
Professor Bell’s book will be available for purchase and author signing at the event.
About the Speakers:
Jason Bell, PhD, is an American academic who received his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. He has served as a Fulbright Professor in Germany and has taught at several universities in the United States, and in Belgium and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell’s classified espionage papers, leading to his previous book Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada's Greatest Spy (2023), which was a national best-seller. He is a Professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick.
Dr. Paul Ramsey, a Junior Fellow of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, is a historian of war, strategy, and international relations. Dr. Ramsey was the Edward S. Miller Research Fellow in Naval History at the United States Naval War College and, most recently, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His work examines how early academic writing on strategy, and public opinion about war have shaped the making of foreign policy. He is completing a book on Spenser Wilkinson and British grand strategy in the age of mass democracy, and has published (or forthcoming) articles in War in History and the Journal of Strategic Studies. He holds an MA in the History of Warfare from King’s College London and a PhD in History from the University of Calgary.